Edmonton has released a new mobile app called SmartTravel. The new mobile app issues verbal safety warnings to Edmonton drivers. You can get live warnings as you drive or before. Interesting idea.
From Slashtdot, Mattel has released a Barbie® Careers Game Developer Doll. She has “[b]right red hair and eyeglasses are fashion-forward with techie style!” This time Mattel has been careful not to be patronizing.
A laptop (with real game code graphics), tablet (with the game she is working on) and silvery headset expand the storytelling possibilities and career opportunities.
Inspire young gamers with this doll who is at the top of her game!
Godwin’s Bot is a good essay from Misha Lepetic on 3QuarksDaily on artificial intelligence (AI). The essay reflects on the recent Microsoft debacle with @TayandYou, an AI chat bot that was “targeted at 18 to 24 year old in the US.” (About Tay & Privacy) For a New Yorker story on how Microsoft shut it down after Twitter trolls trained it to be offensive see I’ve Seen the Greatest A.I. Minds of My Generation Destroyed By Twitter. Lepetic calls her Godwin’s Bot after Godwin’s Law that asserts that in any online conversation there will eventually be a comparison to Hitler.
What is interesting about the essay is that it then moves to an interview wtih Stephen Wolfram on AI & The Future of Civilization where Wolfram distinguishes between inventing a goal, which is difficult to automate, and (once one can articulate a goal clearly) executing it, which can be automated.
How do we figure out goals for ourselves? How are goals defined? They tend to be defined for a given human by their own personal history, their cultural environment, the history of our civilization. Goals are something that are uniquely human.
Lepetic then asks if Tay had a goal or who had goals for Tay. Microsoft had a goal, and that had to do with “learning” from and about a demographic that uses social media. Lepetic sees it as a “vacuum cleaner for data.” In many ways the trolls did us a favor by misleading it.
Or … TayandYou was troll-bait to train a troll filter.
My question is whether anyone has done a good analysis of how the Tay campaign actually worked?
The New York Times has a nice story about how Sandra Day O’Connor, A Supreme Court Pioneer, Now Making Her Mark on Video Games. O’Connor is promoting a game called Win the White House from iCivics a education group she started in 2009. She has also involved her Supreme Court colleague Sotomayor. The article mentions how such educational games are getting more respect.
The involvement of the two justices in digital educational games underscores a growing belief among educators that interactive tools may improve students’ engagement in their own learning. In January, Microsoft introduced an educational version of Minecraft, the hit game in which players use blocks to construct elaborate virtual worlds. Last fall, Google unveiled Expeditions, a virtual reality system for classroom use that takes students on simulated field trips around the world.
There are a number of stories about The Malware Museum on the Internet Archive. This archive gathers a number of 1980s and 1990s viruses (just the animated parts) with emulators so you can run them and see their visual effects. The Toronto Star story has a quote from Hyponnen on the art of the early viruses,
“You could call it an art form,” he said in an interview. “These early virus-writers were expressing themselves with animations and sounds.”
It wasn’t until later that viruses started encrypting things and blackmailing you to decrypt them or doing other things to make money.
There is an extended talk (50 minutes) by Mikko Hypponen, the security specialist who gave this collection, on The History and the Evolution of Computer Viruses. The talk starts with the first PC virus BRAIN that he traced back to two brothers in Packistan to Stuxnet. (For a good book on Stuxnet see Kim Zetter’s Countdown to Zero Day.)
Eric Raymond, widely admired for his The Cathedral and the Bazaar, is now peddling social justice paranoia. See Why Hackers Must Eject the SJWs. He starts with the following,
The hacker culture, and STEM in general, are under ideological attack. Recently I blogged a safety warning that according to a source I consider reliable, a “women in tech” pressure group has made multiple efforts to set Linus Torvalds up for a sexual assault accusation. I interpreted this as an attempt to beat the hacker culture into political pliability, and advised anyone in a leadership position to beware of similar attempts.
See his “safety warning” at From kafkatrap to honeytrap. His evidence for this ideological attack seems to be gossip from trusted sources – gossip that confirms his views about “women in tech” and pressure groups and so on. This sort of war rhetoric closes any opportunity for discussion around the issues of women in technology. For Raymond it is now a (culture) war between those on the side of hacker culture and STEM, against “Social Justice Warriors” and what is at stake is the “entire civilization that we serve.”
Why are these important issues being militarized instead of aired respectfully? When did the people we live with and love become the other? Just how confident are we that we objectively know what merit is in the hurly burly of life? What civilization is this really about?
Other reactions to this story include Linus Torvalds targeted by honeytraps, claims Eric S. Raymond in The Register and Is This the Perfect Insane Anti-Feminist Rumor? from New York Magazine.
NSA to shut down bulk phone surveillance program by Sunday. A first step.
The CBC has a story on how the Canadian video game industry catching up to TV & film production. The story is based on the annual report of the Entertainment Software Association of Canada (ESAC). You can download the PDF from here. Some of the interesting facts from the report include:
The Globe and Mail and other sources are reporting that Computers in classroom have ‘mixed’ impact on learning. This is based on an OECD report titled Students, Computers and Learning: Making the Connection. The overall conclusion is that teaching is about the individual student and can’t be automated. Computers aren’t necessarily good for learning – they should be used for specific projects and used to teach real-world digital skills.
Students who use computers moderately at school tend to have somewhat better learning outcomes than students who use computers rarely. But students who use computers very frequently at school do a lot worse in most learning outcomes, even after accounting for social background and student demographics. (p. 3 of Report)
The Globe quotes Prof. Slotta of OISE to the effect that:
Technology is most effective in the classroom when it is used to develop skills similar to those that adults are using in everyday life, such as finding resources, critiquing arguments, communicating with peers, solving problems and working with data…
Skimming the report and the slide deck shows a complex picture where often countries like Japan have fewer computers in classrooms and do better on learning. Massive investment in computers like that of school boards who get laptops for every child doesn’t seem to lead to improvements in learning.
Put simply, ensuring that every child attains a baseline level of proficiency in reading and mathematics seems to do more to create equal opportunities in a digital world than can be achieved by expanding or subsidising access to high-tech devices and services. (p. 3 of Report)
The report also looked at loneliness and confirmed what parents have suspected,
Last but not least, most parents and teachers will not be surprised by the finding that students who spend more than six hours on line per weekday outside of school are particularly at risk of reporting that they feel lonely at school, and that they arrived late for school or skipped days of school in the two weeks prior to the PISA test.
The slide show prepared by Andreas Schleicher of the OECD suggest that there are larger questions about what sorts of skills should we be teaching in the coming age of automation. The second slide says “The kind of things that are easy to teach are now easy to automate, digitize or outsource.” A slide titled The Race between Technology and Education (title from work by Goldin and Katz) suggests that there is social pain when technology isn’t matched with education. The conclusion is that we need education for a world where many jobs can be automated. Just as the industrial revolution caused social pain in the form of dislocation and unemployment, so too could AI.
Announcing the first issue of the Journal of the Japanese Association for Digital Humanities. I am on the Editorial board of the Journal, but the real credit goes to Charles Muller, Christian Wittern and Kiyonori Nagasaki who are the working editors. This journal represents the maturing of the Japanese digital humanities scene. They have a Japanese Association (JADH) which was founded in 2011, and became constituent organization of ADHO in 2013. Now they have a journal. As Charles Muller, Editor-in-Chief, puts it in his “Dear Readers”,
While Digital Humanities has been practiced in Japan for more than two decades, up to now, little is known outside of Japan regarding the content of Japan advancements in this field. We therefore aim to rectify this situation by initiating a first-tier peer reviewed international journal published in English. Although we hope to be able to shed light on projects in developments in Japan, we will be accepting article submissions from DH practitioners around the world on a broad range of topics.